A pharmacist from the small town of Grafton, Wisconsin has been arrested and charged with deliberately screwing up hundreds of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by taking them out of the refrigerator for two nights.
The Moderna COVID vaccine must be stored in freezers and is viable for up to 12 hours after it is disposed of. The unnamed pharmacist took out 57 vials containing more than 500 doses on Christmas Eve and put them back in the next morning. He left the bottles on the night of December 25. They were found the next morning by another member of staff.
So far the police have no motive for the vandalism.
Associated Press:
Bahr said health system officials were more suspicious of the pharmacist when they viewed the incident. After multiple interviews, the pharmacist acknowledged on Wednesday that he had deliberately removed the vaccine over the two nights, Bahr said.
That means the doses people got on Saturday are pretty much useless, he said. Moderna has told Aurora there are no safety concerns, but the hospital system is closely monitoring people who have received the tainted doses, he said.
According to the Washington Examiner, the authorities at Advocate Aurora Medical Center tried to make the best of the situation by quickly administering doses until the vaccine went bad.
As the study progressed and the medical center got to grips with the situation, they quickly tried to administer some of the vaccines, as they are usable until they thaw and cannot be refrozen. Hundreds of doses were discarded, but some were administered, although Aurora health officials had doubts about the effectiveness of those doses as they were taken twice from their refrigerated storage unit.
Jeff Bahr, the president of Aurora Health Care Medical Group, called the person a “bad actor.”
The vandalism draws attention to what is developing into an epic clusterfark of vaccine rollout. Governors in both the red and blue states are angry with Washington for not sending them the promised doses of vaccine – sometimes hundreds of thousands fewer doses.
CBS:
More than 10 states have been told the number of doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine they expected to receive next week has been cut, with little information as to why. State officials in Wyoming, Minnesota, Washington, California, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Connecticut and Kentucky have said they have been notified of cuts.
While some states have not specified the extent of the reduction, officials in Washington and Oregon said their states will receive 40% fewer doses than expected. California is getting 160,000 fewer doses than expected. For Michigan it is nearly 25,000.
The Trump administration points out that there is a misunderstanding between the FBI and the states. The number of doses they were told were ‘planning figures’.
“Potential planning figures had been provided in recent months on the understanding that they were just that: potential. States were told they would get the final allocation a week before the official allocation numbers, depending on the amount of doses available from the manufacturers, ”the official said.
I call that nonsense. In fact, official announcements about vaccine distribution said nothing about “planning figures.” The FBI was overly optimistic about how many vaccine doses would be available, or it is possible that the companies themselves misjudged. Either way, the process isn’t going as smoothly as promised anyway.